Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I identify, I guess, as a conservative Catholic.
It's always good to have fears for your eternal soul.
Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war.
I don't think of 'heretic' as a pejorative term - necessarily.
Even Warren Buffet is allowed to have an awful year from time to time.
Human beings seek community, and permanent openness is hard to sustain.
Even conservative columnists tend to prefer humor that isn't fit to print.
Liberalism has never done as well as it thinks at resolving its own crises.
Our founders built a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions.
It's not always clear where a healthy patriotism shades into a dangerous nationalism.
You start reading C.S. Lewis, then you’re reading G.K. Chesterton, then you’re a Catholic.
For all its deranging effects, I am always grateful to Twitter for the interesting ideas it surfaces.
Celibacy used to offend family-values conservatism; now it offends equally against the opposite spirit.
If you're too confident in assuming that America's and God's purposes are one, you tiptoe toward idolatry.
Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left.
For presidential power to meaningfully expand, it is not enough for a president to simply make a power grab.
Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.
I grew up in a household that spent most of my childhood on a religious pilgrimage through American Christianity.
I read a lot of G.K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.
Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.
The idea of a post-religious society is a fantasy, ultimately. Human beings are, by nature, religious in various ways.
Every Christian in every time and place is going to be tempted by certain forms of heresy. I'm sure I'm tempted by my own.
The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics.
Where conservative Catholics have the power to resist what seem like false ideas or disastrous innovations they must do so.
I think it's totally possible and plausible that racial balkanization is a recurring aspect of the nature of human politics.
If you're willing to recognize the religious element in one secular ideology, you need to be able to recognize it in your own.
I think Trump had this general populist agenda but has not been particularly adept at using the levers of power in Washington.
For American philo-Semites, the Jewish experience wasn't just one minority experience among many, but a signal and elevated case.
When immigration proceeds at a steady but modest clip, deep change comes slowly, and there's time for assimilation to do its work.
I think that secular liberals need to recognize that they are still, often, hanging their worldview on what are metaphysical ideas.
Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full.
Most people want the convenience of the Internet far more than they want the private spaces that older forms of communication protected.
I do think that evangelicals in general need to think seriously about how you pass on your faith across generations and over the long haul.
It's an oversimplication to say that more monks and nuns are the answer to the Joel Osteen-ification of Christianity... but it wouldn't hurt.
The American intelligentsia has been pretty secular for a long time. There have always been figures like Oprah Winfrey, let's put it that way.
Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one's own.
The thinking person's case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn't believe a word he says.
Even secular people can't really escape from the need to rest their ideas on some belief, some sort of commitment that is not scientific commitment.
The prosperity gospel, in its various forms, has always been with us and always will. But that reality is no less problematic for being inescapable.
I think with artists and celebrities, you want to be simultaneously supportive of their conversions without putting too much hope and weight into it.
It is not white nationalism to believe that growing ideological uniformity in the commanding heights of culture makes American politics more polarized.
Many things about American life, that even secular people consider good, have flowed from the presence of a robust, resilient institutional Christianity.
Now fiscal responsibility is generally a good thing, and so a centrism mindlessly focused on tweaking legislation away from deficit spending has its uses.
Every year at this time I join a growing number of journalistic flagellants in enumerating things that I got wrong in the previous annum's worth of columns.
There are voters out there that a moralistic and populist conservative right might win but a flagrantly hypocritical and ethnonationalist conservatism cannot.
I think religious individualism doesn't fulfill impulses toward community and solidarity and it doesn't necessarily work for people when things go really bad.
Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that's formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind.
America's gravest moral evil, chattel slavery, was defeated by an authoritarian president in a religious civil war, not by proceduralism or constitutional debate.
To analyze Trump is to discover only bottomless appetite and need, and to carve at him is like carving at an online troll: The only thing to discover is the void.
The fact that institutional churches have gone into decline doesn't mean that we're going to enter some purely secular age. Secular people need to be aware of that.